JFK Assassination Forum
JFK Assassination Plus General Discussion & Debate => JFK Assassination Plus General Discussion And Debate => Topic started by: Jeff Kaye on November 14, 2025, 08:11:20 PM
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It was July 9, 1964, a little over six months since President John F. Kennedy had been murdered in Dallas, Texas. The former director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, sat in a room inside the National Archives Building on Constitution Avenue for seven hours (minus a break for lunch) with Warren Commission (WC) fellow member, John J. McCloy, three psychiatric experts, and half a dozen other WC staff. Their agenda? A discussion about the possible motives of Kennedy’s purported assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.
One of the psychiatric experts, Dale C. Cameron, was involved in a secret agreement with the CIA for “the administration and treatment of referrals” from the Agency to the government hospital, St. Elizabeth’s, for which he was superintendent, that is, chief administrator. Dulles knew him, certainly. Another one of the experts was a young psychiatrist from the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, David A. Rothstein. When Dulles looked at him, trademark pipe perhaps in hand, he possibly thought, I don’t really know that fellow.
But Dulles likely knew the third psychiatrist very well. But he had to pretend he didn’t know him. Dr. Howard Phillips Rome was head of psychiatry at the world-renowned Mayo Clinic; the former chairman of the Medical Advisory Group to the Administrator of the Veterans Administration; former “head psychiatrist” [PDF pg. 155] for the U.S. Navy, and later consultant in Psychiatry to the U.S. Navy’s Surgeon General; and now, he was President-elect of the American Psychiatric Association. Still, on the record, in front of McCloy and company, Dulles would not indicate he knew this doctor — at least he gave no indication at the meeting that he knew him. Only people with certain clearances knew everything about this doctor.
I am confident Dulles knew Rome, one of the biggest names in American psychiatry, because Rome was also a clandestine consultant to the CIA’s top secret ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA programs. It was Rome who would provide the Warren Commission with the theory, backed by his psychiatric credentials, that Oswald killed the president in part so he, Oswald, could be seen as a “great man.” (For Dulles’ briefings on CIA’s Project ARTICHOKE, see footnote 3 below.)
According to journalist Tad Szulc at The New Republic (TNR), the session’s transcript was classified until 1971, but actually it was declassified in August 1968, according to a copy of the full executive session transcript that I have obtained. (See the end of this article for an embed link to download the entire 247 page document.)
This article continues my investigation into how the CIA controlled the psychiatric “expert'“ testimony provided to the Warren Commission. By itself, my findings constitute prima facie evidence of the CIA’s interest in controlling the findings of the Warren Commission. In combination with decades of research by others into the connections between Oswald and the CIA, the evidence linking the CIA with psychiatric experts who worked for the Warren Commission helps cement a clear-cut case of CIA interference in the official, initial investigation into JFK’s murder.1
Before I continue, I want to thank Dr. Casimir Klim for his willingness to provide some assistance for this article, including Rome’s CV, and also for his 2024 landmark article, published at Stat, which first described the connection between the CIA and the Mayo Clinic in the 1950s. The priority for that discovery is all his....
In October 2024, I wrote an article showing how the Warren Commission had hired two CIA-connected psychiatrists associated with St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. The first hire was Dr. Winfred Overholser, who had recently retired from his position as the long-time head of St. Elizabeth’s. When Overholser developed “complications from heart disease,” Cameron, his successor at the D.C. hospital, took his place as a psychiatric and/or medical consultant to the Commission. Overholser died on October 7, 1964, nine days after the public release of the 888-page Warren Report.
In my October 2024 article, I described how Overholser had links with the intelligence world going back to World War II, where he headed a secret “truth serum” study for the Office of Strategic Services. Additionally, and more to the point, both he and Cameron had been privy to secret agreements between the CIA and the hospital they led, agreements about the disposition of Agency patients. The impetus to hire Overholser apparently came from either John J. McCloy or Earl Warren, as discussed in my earlier article.
While like Overholser and Cameron, Dr. Rothstein was a government psychiatrist, he appears to have no known link to the CIA or the intelligence world. He got his job as psychiatric consultant to the WC after he wrote a letter to Warren Commission head, Chief Justice Earl Warren, describing his special expertise in the psychopathology of would-be presidential assassins, the knowledge of which he had gained from his position at MCFP. Rothstein interviewed ten patients who had been criminally committed to MCFP for, possibly among other things, threats to kill Kennedy and/or Eisenhower. He wrote up his findings in a paper, “The Presidential Assassination Syndrome"....
The third psychiatric member of the special group gathered at the July 9 meeting, Howard Rome, was not a government employee. He was a very prominent psychiatrist, who had just been elected to the presidency of the American Psychiatric Association, the premier psychiatric institution in the nation. (He had not yet assumed the office and was at this point APA’s “president-elect.”)
Interestingly, according to a copy of Howard Rome’s curriculum vitae, forwarded to me from Dr. Klim, Rome was a consultant to the Pentagon’s National Security Agency from 1965-1966. Perhaps this was a recall or clerical error by Rome when he was constructing his CV, assembled apparently sometime in the late 1970s, because according to the full transcript of the meeting with WC staff, Rome told the latter that he was at that time (July 1964) “a consult [sic] to the National Security Agency” (see PDF pg. 7). One wonders why the NSA needed a psychiatrist on staff.
I don’t know how Rome came to be a consultant for the Warren Commission. But one thing I do know, when he sat in that room for many hours with Allen Dulles, it’s highly probable that Dulles knew exactly who he was, that is, a consultant for the CIA’s top secret interrogation program, Project ARTICHOKE, and likely also MKULTRA itself.
The ARTICHOKE program, the successor to the CIA’s Bluebird project, expanded the the CIA’s Cold War interrogation experiments to include hypnotism, electric shock, LSD, barbiturates, amphetamines, and other substances, such as the purported “truth drug” Sodium Pentothal, with the aim of achieving total control over another human being. ARTICHOKE in particular was obsessed with creating amnesia in its subjects, which, as we have seen from the quote earlier in the article, Dr. Rome was apparently quite aware.
Further along, I will provide a sample of the kind of CIA ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA operations that Rome was briefed on and for which he provided input. A future article will explore the April 1955 CIA visit to the Mayo Clinic in far more detail.
Since I am making rather incredible claims in this article, I want to point out that this is not conspiracy theory. I am writing a serious history of events that happened 60-70 years ago. It is based on documentary evidence, and even more, unlike most such articles, I am also providing downloadable documents and/or links to the relevant evidence....
The psychiatric panel that advised the Warren Commission was part of a stealth cover-up of the real facts of the assassination, and a key component in the construction of the fable around Oswald’s motivation for the killing. This portion of the cover-up was godfathered by Allen Dulles, and probably John J. McCloy. Taken together with other revelations about CIA lies, evidence linking Oswald to intelligence agencies, and the activities of other CIA-linked actors surrounding both Oswald and his killer, Jack Ruby, the revelations about the intelligence origins of the primary psychiatric consultants to the Warren Commission demonstrates clear evidence of CIA intention to deceive the American public.
The evidence also shows how much the Warren Commission was performative, and its “investigation” a real-life instance of political theater.
As for the Mayo Clinic and the cooperation of key doctors and scientists with the CIA’s MKULTRA and ARTICHOKE programs, the only thing I can say in their defense is they weren’t alone in working with the CIA. That’s an important point to close with. The Mayo Clinic and University of Minnesota were only two institutions that contributed to the CIA’s work in these areas.
In 1977, testifying before both the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and a Senate Health subcommittee, then CIA Director Stansfield Turner revealed “that the C.I.A. had secretly supported human behavior control research at 80 institutions, including 44 colleges or universities as well as hospitals, prisons and pharmaceutical companies,” according to a New York Times article. This was probably an undercount.
-- For the rest of the article, including the hyperlinks and footnotes and downloadable declassified documents, please go to the full article at https://kayej.substack.com/p/historic-cia-artichoke-meeting-reveals (https://kayej.substack.com/p/historic-cia-artichoke-meeting-reveals)
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Dear Jeffrey,
H.P. Albarelli, Jr., and you wrote the following in a 23 May 2010 "Truthout" article:
"[Project Artichoke was begun in 1951.] Following a brief period of bureaucratic infighting over which CIA department would have jurisdiction over Artichoke, it was decided that the project would be overseen by the Agency’s Security Research Staff, headed by Paul F. Gaynor, a former Army Brigadier General, who had extensive experience in wartime interrogations." (emphasis added)
. . . . . . . .
As you know, the Security Research Staff was in the Office of Security and was, therefore, referred to as OS/SRS.
It's interesting to note that for many years, James Angleton's confidant, mentor, and mole-hunting superior, probable KGB "mole" Bruce Leonard Solie (look him up), was Deputy Chief of OS/SRS and Chief of its Research Branch (OS/SRS/RB).
In his 2022 book, Uncovering Popov's Mole, author John M. Newman wrote that he believes Solie betrayed CIA's spy, GRU Lt. Col. Pyotr Popov, to the KGB in early 1957 by meeting with a Soviet "diplomat," KGB General Vladislav Kovshuk, in Washington, D.C. movie houses, and that when Popov allegedly told his CIA handler in Berlin, (KGB "mole," imho) George Kisevalter, in April 1958 that he had overheard a drunken GRU colonel boast at a New Years Eve party that the Kremlin had all of the U-2's specifications, Solie sent (or duped his confidant, protégé, and mole-hunting subordinate, James Angleton, into sending) Oswald to Moscow as an ostensible "dangle" in a (unbeknownst to Angleton and Oswald) planned-to-fail hunt for "Popov's U-2 Mole" (Solie) in the wrong part of the CIA -- the Soviet Russia Division.
Which mole hunt lasted nine years, protected Solie from being uncovered, tore the SRS apart, and drove Angleton nuts.
-- Tom
. . . . . .
Jeffrey Kaye replied on Substack:
I haven't had the time to properly assess all this "mole" business and have not read Newman's book on the subject. As I progress farther into old age, I find I have limited time and patience for new complex topics of investigation. This mole business is quite complex and rests upon testimonies of unreliable narrators on all sides. ("Unreliable" in the sense that they all have reasons to potentially exaggerate, lie, minimize, or misdirect, due to their roles in the espionage world.)
I appreciate your input. My comment is not meant to derogate the topic you raise. For the record, the portion of the Truthout article you cite was Albarelli's product, not mine. Each of us contributed different parts to the overall article, with Hank as primary author having final say.
My reply on Substack:
Have you heard of former CIA counterintelligence officer, Tennent H. Bagley, PhD? (If not, you can read my Wikipedia article about him.) Bagley wrote scathingly about Bruce Solie in his 2007 Yale University Press book, “Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games,” because, among other things, he had “cleared” false (or possibly rogue) KGB defector Yuri Nosenko in October 1968 via a bogus polygraph exam and a specious report. Around 2013, a British JFKA conspiracy theorist and National Archives habitue by the name of Malcolm Blunt convinced Bagley — by showing him some CIA documents he hadn’t been privy to in 1959-60 and 1964 — to put Solie “on the list” of possible moles in the CIA. The aforementioned John M. Newman, who dedicated his book, “Uncovering Popov’s Mole,” to Bagley, incorporated a lot of Bagley’s information in it and carried it a step farther by positing that Solie was a KGB “mole” and that he had sent (or duped Angleton into sending) unwitting-as-to-his-true-mission Oswald to Moscow in October 1959.
I just thought you might find it "interesting" that Paul Gaynor's right-hand man was a probable KGB mole.
https://archive.org/details/SpyWarsMolesMysteriesAndDeadlyGames
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Welcome to the Forum, Jeffrey!